I'm Natalie Liu, and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions, where we break the patterns that break our hearts, relationships and bodies.

Since 2005, I've run one of the longest running self-help blogs in the world, BaggageReclame.com.

I'm a boundaries and relationship coach and the author of five books including Mr. Unavailable and the

fallback girl and the joy of saying no. I help you reclaim yourself from emotional baggage by

letting go of emotional and availability, people pleasing and unhealthy relationships so you can live

in love with more love, care, trust and respect.

Hello, hello, hello.

How are you doing?

A few weeks back in episode 309, I talked about fear of disapproval and conflict. And in today's episode, I want to broaden out of it to encompass what I call life's

inevitables. These are stress, conflict, criticism, disappointment, loss, and rejection.

And I call them inevitable because it's inevitable that we are going to experience these.

None of us are exempt.

And what I've learned over the years is that when we stop viewing these as something

that shouldn't be happening to us, that we can prevent with people-pleasing imperfectionism,

over-giving, over-giving,

over-thinking, and over-responsibility, seeing them as something to avoid at all costs,

seeing them as signs that we are, you know, not good enough, that we've done something wrong,

that it's a punishment or something, that our relationship with being human shifts dramatically.

For me, there was sort of this sense of when things were going really good, it was almost like, oh yeah, like, I must have had a really big hand in this.

And then something would happen. So I would be more stress than usual about something because that's

what something stressful is supposed to do. I would, I don't know, experience a disappointment

or rejection, I'd been almost like, oh, but I thought I was doing all the right things.

...